Can You Blame Them? The French Flee…75% Tax Rate

The rich are fleeing France. Can you blame them? Newly elected president Francois Hollande is proposing a massive, immoral, and unfair tax rate of 75% on the wealthy to help keep France’s bloated welfare state alive. However, what’s wrong with taxing anyone making above $1 million dollars a year? First, the wealthy, also known and the job creating and investing class, shouldn’t be squeezed because they’re successful. The success they’ve earned is the incentive for all of us to work hard and get to that point of economic security. In a competitive capitalist system, there will be winners and losers. The person with the most innovative idea wins. It’s as simple as that, which is a concept that is becoming anathema to the greater socialist sympathizing European electorate. Even our own president believes in a “shared prosperity.”

This new system has many of the investing class in France asking if they should bother to remain in their home country. In addition, it provides a little foresight into how our nation runs its welfare state. A greater proportion of the population supported by an ever diminishing tax base. Fellow Resistance 44 writer, Christine Rousselle, posted this column in her other publication, The College Conservative, on August 9th where she said :

France has incurred their massive debt problem via an extremely generous social welfare program and an unwillingness to embrace any sort of austerity measures. It’s great to take care of citizens via healthcare and other benefits, but if a country cannot produce the money to actually pay for programs like this, problems will manifest themselves. France is spending itself into oblivion and instead of cutting spending, they are taxing those who actually contribute to society and to the economy.

If tous “les Riches” leave France, France will definitely be in a bit of a pickle. Their current top tax rate is 41%, which is high, even for European standards. The proposed 75% rate would be the new highest tax bracket in all of Europe. Only an estimated 7,000 to 30,000 people in France even earn enough money to place them into the 75% bracket— a number that’s certain to dwindle.

The rich did not get rich by being stupid. They’ll figure out a way to avoid paying the tax, or they’ll leave the country. No French citizen making 800,000 euro is going to actually want to make any more money than that. Why would they? They would be punished harshly for their new earnings. Also, what business is going to want to move into an area that treats those who make money so poorly? According to the New York Times, several firms have already backed out of moving into France. This is costing jobs for citizens of France.

The French cannot continue like this much longer. Instead of taxing the wealthy at extreme rates, perhaps the French should start giving birth to additional tax-payers. France hasn’t had fertility rates at above-replacement levels since 1974, and has experienced a birth rate as low as 1.75 births per woman in 1994.

Well, in terms of socio-economic security, France is about to be on life support. Nevertheless, Rousselle is right. How is it moral to keep distributing these payments when you know they’re unsustainable? Do these leftys in France really think they can dump the weight of the welfare state on 30,000 citizens? It exposes the delirium the political left experiences when it comes to solving the biggest problem with socialism: what to do once we’ve spent everyone else’s money. Lastly, any economic model which hinges its success on a transfer of wealth is grossly unfair. Look at our own Social Security model. It was great for our grandparents’ generation, but as our parents approach retirement age; they’ll be left with virtually nothing. It’s the quintessential ponzi scheme. For the millennials, we’d be lucky to see a penny once we hit sixty-five. On the other hand, we’ve known Social Security will inevitably become insolvent, so shame on the baby boomers for their inaction.

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Consider for a moment the enthralling interest presented by the variety of human individuality and destiny. By a law of our nature, we do not find the same pleasure in the rigid proportions of symmetry as we do in a rapid or even leisurely movement of development. The static aspects of the Universe do not satisfy us as do the dynamic. The pleasures of still life soon pall, but the perpetual dramatic interest of experience, with its endless shocks and surprises, is inexhaustible. Genius and mediocrity, virtue and vice, wealth and poverty, good and ill-fortune, success and failure, the ideal and the actual……..it is the contemplation of these ‘variables’ with all the gradations that lie between, which fire the imagination, inspires art, and makes life a changeful vista full of engrossing fascination to the student of the soul. If this element of contrast suddenly gave place to a monotonous equality of character and lot, life would instantly lose its salt and savor to beings such as we are.

There is no pictures of human life so wearisome and insipid as the Utopias of poets and reformers.

We sincerely try to admire them; but in the end we secretly turn away from them and say;

‘Give us the world as it is, with all its topsy-turvydoms and inequalities, its squalor and its splendor, its low attainments and steep ideals, its ecstasies and its agonies, as a place to live in.’

Nature does not send all of her children into the world equally endowed for the battle of life; she does not place them in equally advantageous conditions; she does not seem to care for the interests of the less fortunate as she does for those of the fortunate. Accordingly, the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong; and though by degrees the ascending scale of life is climbed and the world is filled with finer and happier creatures, yet every step of that stairway is slippery with the blood of those which have perished on the way up. The final result is glorious, but the method by which it has been attained seems, at least at first sight, strangely ruthless and coldly cruel.

This is no accident, no chance happening; it is one of Nature’s ineradicable, ubiquitous laws.

Those who dream of an ideal social condition in which manifold differences that distinguish men as regards their endowments, their outward lot and fortune, their ultimate destiny in life, are to be finally and forever leveled, and in which all are to have an equal share in the good of existence, may be filled with a most worthy and laudable ambition; but it is certain that they are flying in the face of the constitution of the Universe.

Men are not born equal, nor do they fare equally, nor can any artificially arranged equality amongst them be long maintained. You may minimize the evils of inequality, and readjust your estimates of men in view of their wide differences of gift and opportunity, but the fact you will never remove.

Not with all your inward heats and outward revolts will you reverse this law; you must reconstruct the Universe ere you will annul its operation or undo its consequences. In dealing with a fact like this, it is better therefore, frankly to face it, than fruitlessly to gird against it.